Are the Waddies of New York sufficiently introduced? We certainly know them better historically than Major Granby could, when, presented by Ambient, he had passed his first afternoon in their society. Not so well personally; one look of a practised eye discovers more than all description or all history can reveal.
Granby was a wide-worldling of the best type, and the ladies and Mr. Waddie found him charming. Sir Com Ambient, that pleasant pinkling of hesitant utterance, was also a favourite; indeed, Diana had quite petted him on the voyage, for she liked travellers, even verdant ones. Freshmen, when they are honest and ardent, are pleasant to meet. So she had petted him—poor Sir Com! He was not at all blasé, a fresh and susceptible youth; and of course he lost his heart utterly.
Granby spoke of his friend Ira. Mr. Ambassador Waddie had heard of this gentleman; in fact, who had not?
“We suppose Mr. Ira Waddy to belong to a younger branch of our somewhat ancient family,” he explained. “Indeed, I have already written him to inquire our relationship. We shall be happy to meet him as a kinsman and as a friend of Major Granby.”
The young ladies were interested in the major’s account of his friend. He was not, Granby said, a misogynist, though he always avoided women if he could. He was a cynic of the kindest heart. Utterly careless of money, but possessed of a Pactolian genius for making it, he dashed at a speculation as a desperate man rides through a front of opposing battle. It seemed that he valued success so little that the Fates were willing to give it him.
“Perhaps,” said Diana, “the Fates took an antecedent revenge. Perhaps they are lavishly compensating him with what he does not value for the fatal loss of what he did.”
Granby looked hard at her, studying the hieroglyphs of her expressive face. What experience had this young person had, enabling her to divine such secrets of his own life and what he had divined in his friend’s history? A sham Champollion would have given his interpretation that she was generalising from some disappointment of the wrong man and not the right one having offered her a bouquet. Granby, looking deeper, perceived that to this maiden, whom the gods loved, they had given some early sorrow, which she was endeavouring to explain to herself.
Granby went on with the character of Mr. Waddy. He was a man who concerned himself not much with books. Having his own thoughts, he did not hungrily need those of other men. He could exhaust the books by a question or two from those who took the trouble to read them. But if generally not a believer in the works of men or the words of women, he was a child of nature.
“During the long and excursive pilgrimage from India to London,” explained Granby, “which we have made together, there is hardly one oddity, one beauty, one fact or phenomenon in nature, not human, that we have not investigated. We’ve shot and bagged everything; we’ve fished and fished up everything.”
And then, the major, who liked to talk—and who does not?—to beautiful women, told them snake stories and tales of crocodiles, and how, in the primary sense, he and his friend had seen the elephant and fought the tiger. Then he passed to the Crimean campaign, where Mr. Waddy had joined him and gone about recklessly to see the fun of fighting and relieve its after agony. On the side of fun, there was a story how Mr. Waddy and Chin Chin had surrounded a picket-guard of a Russian officer and four men and brought them in prisoners at the point of their own bayonets—a pardonable violation of the neutrality laws. On the other side, was the account of Major Granby’s own rescue by his friend. Granby told this last with an enthusiasm that showed the earnestness of his friendship.